Under Assault: Teaching in NYC

What passes as the "least restrictive environment" these days

2009-11-22T09:04:00.070-05:00

This post continues Part I: Reaching for the whistle.

When a parent agrees to place his child in "special ed," a team puts together an Individual Education Plan (IEP) to prescribe a projected learning environment for him.

According to some, IEPs are the "heart of the special education system," the legal instruments that will make it easier for students to learn. IEPs can stipulate how many kids should be in all the child's new classes or whether he should be mainstreamed/included/integrated into general ed classes, get help in a resource room, or receive other kinds of services for a range of disabilities.

The DoE talks about how "more intensive services" will be provided in self-contained special ed classes. It also claims to work "to make certain that the child is provided with what he or she needs to succeed."

That last bit is, of course, poppycock. The DoE makes certain of nothing at all and in fact hires more lawyers to obfuscate, evade, convert mandates into recommendations, justify violations, and keep whistleblowing in check.

The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) of 2004 requires that special ed students be placed in the "least restrictive environment" (LRE). According to Wikipedia, the "appropriate mix" of services will vary from child to child and from year to year as the child develops. "If the school officials have provided the maximum appropriate exposure to non-disabled students, they have fulfilled their obligation under IDEA."

A concept as vague as that has the potential of hurting all childen all the time — not just the IEP kids.

Teachers cannot split themselves into multiple people. They can only address certain skill sets at any given time. The kids who learn differently than the way the teacher is working the room at any point in the lesson — whether they're the more proficient learners or the struggling ones — are pretty much getting less direction, supervision, attention, intellectual stimulation, and specific help than the crowd he's focusing on in that moment. De facto.

Since words like "mainstreaming," "inclusion," and "integration" are being thrown around all the time, I was happy to come across this extract from a fact sheet put out by the NY Lawyers for the Public Interest in 2006, which adds some clarity to the subject:
Q: What does LRE mean for my child?

A: What all this means is that legally, under the Least Restrictive Environment requirement,a child with a disability should be allowed to attend a general education class, in his or her zoned school, and receive the services needed to make such a placement work, unless there is proof that he or she cannot receive educational benefits in that setting. If he or she cannot receive educational benefits in that setting, he or she should be educated in a context that provides access to general education students and general education curriculum to the maximum extent appropriate to the student’s individual needs.

The Least Restrictive Environment is related to, but different from, the concepts of “inclusion,” “integration,” and “mainstreaming.” “Inclusion” means that primary instruction and provision of appropriate special education services are provided in (i) an age-appropriate general education class (ii) in the student’s home school (iii) with appropriate additional supports for the student and the student’s teacher.¹ Importantly, inclusion does not require a child with a disability to perform at the same level as his or her general education peers. By contrast, “mainstreaming” means that a child with a disability is educated in a general education classroom for those areas of instruction in which the child can be expected to perform at the level of nondisabled peers without needing supplementary aids and services. “Integration” means that children with disabilities and children without disabilities are educated together, though not necessarily in general education classrooms.
¹This definition of inclusion comes from the New York State Education Department’s Least Restrictive Environment Implementation Policy Paper, which was updated in May 1998 [see this link]. Some people at the Department of Education may define inclusion differently, so it is important to clarify what they mean by inclusion when they are talking about options for your child.
The special education statutes do not mention “inclusion,” “mainstreaming” or “integration,” but they do require that children with disabilities be educated in the Least Restrictive Environment. “Inclusion,” “mainstreaming,” and “integration” may be the Least Restrictive Environment for some children but not for others.
It seems to me that what LRE and the Act really do is institutionalize wiggle room. Under the cover of doing what's "best" for the individual child with disabilities, administrators have the legal tool to fudge almost everything.

On top of that, LRE doesn't take into account the effect mainstreaming, inclusion and integration have on the more proficient students, and that bothers me a whole lot.

A couple of days ago, I learned that the DoE thinks of music as a "non-academic activity," on a par with lunch. I don't think most music teachers will agree with that, but it shows what kind of managers we have at Tweed.

More to the point, though there are many IEP students in my school who take their core subjects in a 15:1 class, not a single one of them go to a small class for music. That means administrators at all levels believe that every last special ed kid in high school can function in a regular ed music class regardless of his particular disabilities.

That's appalling. What is an "IEP" if not a recommendation for a single child. Some of these kids are reading, writing and comprehending at the 2nd-grade level. Their classmates in these humongous classes are writing college applications. I'm doing my best not to hurt the slower learners, but when I teach to the middle capabilities of the whole-class profile, most of the IEP kids (not to mention a certain number of others whose parents refused special ed) CANNOT DO THE WORK. And please don't bring up differentiation. It's one thing to differentiate, it's a whole other thing to award a high school credit when a student can't do a tenth of the subject matter.

No doubt schools are designing IEPs — or altering them illegally — to cattle-herd special ed kids into large, heterogeneous classes with up to 50 on register in all grades. After all, they are fulfilling their obligation under IDEA to give IEP students exposure to the gen ed population. Be damned emotional damage to the struggling child or the delivery of content!

"Least restrictive environment" should not mean creating living hells for teachers and students by such indefensible placement policies. These classes are not right for them, whether they have decoding problems, low IQ, attention deficit, anger management issues, or hearing deficiencies. They get frustrated, and we're hurting them.

That's indicative of a general callousness to inner city kids at the very highest levels of policy making in this city, state and country.

I'm not finished with this topic yet. In Part III, I'll be giving some specifics.

By the way, I used ARIS, just like Pissed Off. Too bad the data I'm looking at today over there is the same as it was when I started writing these posts. That makes ARIS about 3 weeks out of date. How much did it cost?

Reaching for the whistle

2009-11-22T08:54:00.031-05:00

I'm ashamed it's taken me so long to write about how special ed kids aren't getting serviced the way they should be. It's not that I haven't wanted to. I've been busy weighing the consequences of speaking publicly on the DoE's abrogation of responsibilities to NYC school children in both special ed and regular ed classrooms.

The plan for special education services outlined in June of 2000 sounds good in theory, but it's hard for me to believe that the people who designed this program couldn't foresee that violations would become widespread once administrators tried to stay inside tight budgets.

As I mentioned a couple of days ago, I haven't reported the violations I know about to the UFT, which created a website to receive such complaints last spring. That's because when I wrote to the person at the union who determines whether a complaint should be forwarded up to Albany for investigation, she flat out told me that speaking with her does not in itself give me whistleblower protection.

Googling around a bit, I now see why. According to a City Council whistleblower law enacted in 2007 (described in the NY Teacher at this link), reporting a wrongdoing to a UFT official doesn't trigger the law's protection against retaliation. To get that, you must send your report to at least one of eight offices: the public advocate, the comptroller, a City Council member, the city's Dept of Investigations (DOI), the DoE's Office of Special Investigations (OSI), the mayor, the chancellor, or the deputy chancellor. The UFT is not in that list.

Also, reporting a violation doesn't mean something is going to be done to fix the problem. And of course there's also the question of retaliation. The same article says it might take the form of "dismissal, suspension, discipline and a U-rating," but there's no mention of one option that has been used to marginalize outspoken teachers for years: excessing.

It's obvious there's not so many music positions in schools now that the DoE has found ways to circumvent state mandates for the arts. Seniority doesn't protect you all that much. Administrators can shut your position in a New York minute and put even a very senior teacher into excess. My guess is that if a music teacher were to blow a whistle, a principal would excess him or her immediately and just pretend the program was cut for other reasons.

Knowing all this, participating in the charade of special ed is becoming increasingly uncomfortable for me as an educator, so I'm putting some of this stuff out here and letting the chips fall where they may.

A compromise maybe, but I'm not yet ready to string myself up by the neck and yell "Jump!"

PART I: Thoughts on the New Continuum

A 52-page document on the Continuum of Services for kids with disabilities (accessed by a link on the DoE website here) claims that regular ed and special ed students are "more alike than different" and that "integrating programs and resources result in improved student outcomes for all."

I disagree with that right there. Improved student outcomes for all? Hardly. Especially when they seem not to have put a limit on the number of IEP kids that can be mainstreamed into a regular ed class. If you mix large numbers of kids with learning disabilities, behavioral issues and/or limited facility in English into NYC's already oversized classes, the outcome for the average and good learners won't be improved one tiny bit.

In fact, the intellectual needs of the more proficient learners won't probably even be met, because while you're attending to the kids who are struggling, you're obviously depriving the others of more challenging learning experiences suitable to their mental and maturational levels.

And the opposite is also true. If you aim your discussions and classwork at these better learners, those who are struggling will start exhibiting all the behaviors of avoidance and frustration that led them to special ed solutions in the first place: fooling around, talking, retreating mentally into their own worlds, and if you're not careful, reaching for their cellphones and iPods. Add to these the kids who aren't special ed but really should be — those are the ones whose parents declined the extra help for whatever reason. With all this going on, the bottom line is that in large and diverse groups, what the teacher believes to be the essence of the subject frequently can't be delivered at all.

I've mentioned many times already that HS music classes have up to 50 kids on register, containing students in all four grades (9th through 12th), regular ed and special ed, repeaters, English-language learners and those who are hearing impaired. Some of the struggling learners read, write, and comprehend at early elementary school levels, other students are going home at night to fill out college applications.

So many special ed kids are being mainstreamed/included/integrated into my oversized — but contractually legal — music classes that I feel the system is just about broken.

Continued in Part II, which I'm still writing, but in the meantime, please also go over to Pissed Off, who is duking it out with some adversarial commenters as we speak.

Needless to say, I'm on her side, and if you get a chance to read the rest of what I've been working on for a couple of weeks, you'll see we're coming to the exactly the same conclusions.

The union talks a good game about special ed violations

2009-11-19T20:25:00.026-05:00

I was at the Delegate Assembly yesterday when the UFT management gave a big presentation on its "No Excuses" campaign against special ed violations, which they initiated last spring.

Michael Hirsch's article in the NY Teacher is a good place to start if you don't know anything about how principals are cutting services to kids with IEPs to save money. According to Hirsch, teacher input on the UFT's website for reporting these violations paints a "devastating picture of rampant neglect."

"The number of complaints is staggering," says UFT VP Carmen Alvarez. "But we already know that these kids are failing. The IEP is not a piece of paper; it’s a coordinated effort to save kids.”

Here are the kinds of things Hirsch says teachers are writing in:

Not having two appropriately certified teachers in Collaborative Team Teaching classes when IEP kids require them,

Principals amending IEPs on their own, without input and approval from the IEP team,

Inappropriate disciplinary suspensions,

Lack of paraprofessional support services,

Failure to provide related services,

Staff being denied access to IEPs, and

Therapists being told to discontinue services for students who plainly need them, and

General education teachers unaware — because IEPs are unavailable, in some cases for months — that students in their class have disabilities and are required to receive support and instructional and testing accommodations.

I am trying to figure out which educators have the cojones to register these kinds of complaints. Schools Chancellor Joel Klein has, after all, created a culture of aggressive thuggery against teachers. It seems he'd give any principal who wanted to retaliate against a whistleblower his royal blessing, if not a bevy of lawyers to keep this kind of bravery under control.

I haven't yet mentioned the one complaint the union says it's been getting that really hurts the teacher more than the kids:

Teachers with oversized classes and behavior issues that they can’t manage.

It's clear to me that administration will try to convince anyone who's listening that the negative results of their own mismanagement must always be the teacher's lack of skill. It's really not, but who cares about the truth when you're busy cost-cutting and want to "encourage" those expensive senior teachers to think about retiring.

I'm not crazy about all aspects of the union's campaign. Alvarez told the delegates yesterday that under Chapter 408 of the state ed law, everyone dealing with the IEP student has to be informed of his responsibilities in this process prior to the implementation of the IEP. That is one scary feature.

If they're going to mainstream inordinate numbers of IEP students into regular ed the way they've been doing for so many years, I'd rather not know what that little ol' IEP team envisioned for me when they placed those kids in such great and irrational numbers into my classes. They sure aren't going to be walking in my shoes, and I don't want to be held to any of the guidelines they might come up with off the top of their collaborative head. None of them have the experience of what it's possible to deliver in such large learning environments as our NYC classrooms, especially when there are so many overwhelming behavioral issues and widely differing skill sets.

The IEP team will be planning for that single IEP child. I'll be having deal with the whole shebang, and they will neither know of what I'll be up against or even much care.

You can read Chapter 408 of the 2002 state ed law and its amendments in Appendices 1 and 2 of this link. (Scroll down towards the end.)

This just in !

2009-11-17T20:26:00.019-05:00

For all you teachers of electives, here's a bit of news.

The DoE doesn't think we're teaching classes like everyone else. They think we're running things called "non-academic mainstreaming activities" — like LUNCH!

I found this out when I was googling the web yesterday looking for how many IEP kids are legally allowed to be mainstreamed into my general music classes.

Never found the answer to that, but I did come across something called "A Parent's Guide to Understanding the IEP Process." It's a pdf of what looks like a power point presentation given at some kind of parent convention in the spring of 2008.

Check out the last sentence in this paragraph below, where it talks about the kinds of subjects we all thought we were "teaching":

Maybe it's a good thing to be doing "non-academic mainstreaming activities" with my kids. It might mean I don't have to write lesson plans anymore, or even get observed.

I says what's good for the cafeteria lady is good enough for me.

Raw experience into words

2009-11-02T09:51:00.010-05:00

SMALL ADDITION TO THIS POST:
At someone's request, Pakter gives a 3-part update to his case in the comments below and has now sent around some pictures of his famous plants — the subject of the latest charges brought against him by the DoE. Since I can't illustrate the comments, here is one of the offending plants.

The other one is also green, I guess.

I've posted Pakter before (feisty alliteration) and need to do it again, not only for the breadth of his commentary, but for his insight into the way this malevolent chancellorship distorts a profession and maims a generation of kids.

He wrote this to Norm Scott of Ednotes fame.

In New York City, Whistle-blower Teachers
— of Joel Klein's School System —
Get Blown Away

Dear Norm:

I read Ed Notes religiously, every day, as well as some of the other excellent Education websites, although nothing even comes close to your Ed Notes- may it go on till you are one hundred and perhaps for a few years after that.

All the present fuss over New York City Teachers reporting cheating truly amuses this old geezer writing to you. Not that the topic is not important.

Shocked- just shocked. You mean to say there are really car thieves and illegal Betting Parlors in every big City in America. Impossible - How can that be ??

So what else is new. Cheating went on in every school I ever taught in and at the High School where I taught for twenty five years, mark altering / "improving"/ "updating" - was raised to a virtual "art".

I wonder if Principals demand Kickbacks for all the gallons of "white-out" they order every June to ensure that their graduation totals will look even better and rosier than the previous year's stellar "improvement".

As for using a "Passing" Regents grade as an excuse to ignore a Failing Class Grade score- how the heck do you think they come up with those "regents scores".

At my former school, and I am sure many would not be surprised to learn, at 99 % of the NYC High Schools, all Regents Scores are referred to as a student's "Raw Regents Score". That is to say- the actual grade the student earned on the actual Regents Examination.

Then at my former school, the teachers were actually given printed "Regents Score Conversion Graphs" that indicated what to enter as the student's final official Regents grade in a particular subject- such as Earth Science for example.

If the student achieved a real grade of 43 for example- the teacher just ran his/her finger across the graph to find that this "raw" score was to be converted to a 65, for example. You can imagine what a "raw score" of 65, became in the final adjustment. "Harvard University - here we come".

When it comes to grades and grading, the entire 23 Billion dollar NYC DOE is one big scam from A to Z.

As for a Teacher going to "The Office of Special Investigations"- please - give me a break.

That office is the slickest shell game of all. Sure, they bust a small time independent electrical contractor from time to time just to make it look like they are really doing "Investigations".

But their real purpose for existing is to put out potential political fires before they even have a chance to become fires. I went to them with tons of stuff and got stone-walled every time. I know everyone down there by name. That office is a total crock.

I shall never forget the day, after I was most unceremoniously removed from my school (after I refused to surrender evidence in my possession of egregious Federal Civil Rights violations as well as financial fraud being perpetrated by the Principal and her cronies), when I received a very brief call on my cell phone.

I had just been removed and illegally transferred to a Rubber Room gulag in Brooklyn. The caller was one of several SCI "investigators", (most of them former or retired NYC Police Officers), assigned to look into the allegations I had reported to that agency on several different occasions.

His words were- and I recall them as though it were yesterday:

"Mr. Pakter, I am just calling you to inform you that I have been ordered to close the book on your case". The call was that short and simple.

But then again, you find this situation existing in the NYPD, the US Army, Mega Corporations, the US Post Office et al. It is the way of the world.

Anyone who seeks to have any type of wrongdoing investigated, quickly discovers that he or she soon becomes the prime object of "investigation".

It is, and has been the way of the world since the Dawn of Time- "Bad News- Then Kill the Messenger".

When I observe all those teacher "nubies" running down to SCI at 80 Maiden Lane in lower Manhattan, a stone's throw from Wall Street, to report horrendous and outrageous criminal activity in the NYC DOE, schools system, I never really know whether I should laugh or cry.

Any one who Whistle-blows in NYC, or most other places just doesn't understand that he or she has just signed and Notarized their own "Death Warrant".

As for going to the Newspapers- "paleeeeeze"- give me a break. Who do you think owns and controls the news media- and I mean 99 % to all of it ???

But every year, as sure as Day follows Night, some young group of idealistic Teachers, God Bless their innocent and naive beautiful Souls, goes running all over the Universe- here, there and everywhere, crying "the sky is falling".

You bet it is, right down squarely on their soon to be chopped off innocent heads.

We old timers smile and just send out our warmest telepathic messages of Love to all the Teacher Whistle-blowers in Gotham and wish them our deepest and most sincere hopes for Good Luck and that they may emerge at the far end of the SCI gauntlet with a little of their tattered skin still hanging from their bloodied backs and torn and broken bodies.

Can an old Geezer like me fault these young idealistic Teachers for all their efforts to make the system better for all the powerless and vulnerable children in NYC- most of whom are already "at Risk", from the moment when they first emerge from their Mother's womb and cry their very first cry.

Who am I to fault and be the least bit cynical that someone wants to protect Gotham's children. When I stare at the face of a NYC Teacher "Nubie'", all pink cheeked and eyes shining, hurrying through the ever-revolving glass doors at 52 Broadway, knapsack heavy with text books hanging over their shoulders, who, my old friend, am I really looking at, but the perfect reflection of who I myself was, almost 40 years ago, starting out in the world of Education in New York City.

I thought back then, as a young Teacher, in the South East Bronx and later, working in Bed-Stuy and Harlem and finally via my self created Medical Program for gifted Minority students at Art & Design High School, that I could, by sheer dint of hard work and a driving Idealistic vision of the Universe make a difference.

That somehow "Good" would triumph over "Evil", honest "Idealism" would or could vanquish rampant corruption, and that somehow, by hook or by crook- I would make a "Difference"- even if just a small degree of difference.

Tell me dear God, I did make a difference.

Tell me my old and dear friend, Norman Scott, that it was not all for nothing.

And that those young Teachers presently fighting the good fight we both began to fight also, in our long distant Youth, so many decades ago, long before the present Whistle-blowers were so much as a glint in their Mother's and Father's eyes- oh please do tell me that they will succeed where we failed to make things better.

Hey Jude- please tell me that things can and will be better and that some good and healing force in the Universe- call it what you will, can and will wash away all those twisted and demented minds and sorry excuses for human beings, who for now at least, have temporarily hijacked the futures of all of Gotham's innocent children and are Hell bent on privatizing all Education in Gotham and turning it all into one gargantuan, multi-billion dollar, For Profit, enterprise.

In some cases trading their future lives and future hopes for a bag of Silver coins.

And I still see, when I lay me down to sleep each night all the laughing, beautiful faces and shining innocent eyes of my former gifted, so very gifted and talented, Medical students in Room 316, so radiant with great expectations and so deserving of Hope, that this present Chancellor, a pathetic "Legend in his own mind", via his countless lackeys, lapdogs and stooges and confederates, criminally robbed from their futures when I, as payment for becoming a Whistle-blower myself, was so violently torn from their school and so violently torn from their Lives.

David Pakter, former Teacher of the Year, STILL STANDING

NO BLOOMBERG !

2009-10-28T19:32:00.016-04:00

ANYBODY

BUT BLOOMBERG.

NEW YORKERS don't need

a self-serving billionaire

and an entrenched oligarchy

carving up the city

and lying to us

for another

four years.

Excerpts from Mayor Bloomberg’s Report Card

From the Chinatown Community

While the Chinatown community is still trying to recover from the 9/11 disaster, Mayor Bloomberg’s policies have only made immigrant working families and small businesses suffer more during his eight years in office.

F In Quality of Life & Housing

Bloomberg’s rezoning plan in the community has resulted in eviction for hundreds of residents and soaring rents of as much as 400% for both residents and small businesses.

Bloomberg has allowed illegal rent gouging to continue on City property without any oversight for many years.

While working families are being displaced from NYC, Bloomberg continues to give tax incentives to luxury developers, only resulting in luxury condos and hotels sitting empty our community.

F In Education

Bloomberg is Cheating! He is inflating school performance scores to cover up problems of overcrowding, cuts in after-school services in schools, and disparities in schools in different communities.

He is excluding parents from important decisions.

F In Democracy

Overturning term limits is something even Guiliani did not do — even right after 9/11; but Bloomberg does it after promising otherwise.

His hijacking of democracy coupled with a $200 million dollar budget, denied New Yorkers a broader choice of candidates for Mayor.

A+ In Lying

Bloomberg is a master of saying one thing and doing another!

Faulty technology at the DoE:Incompetence, or hiding the facts

2009-10-25T13:38:00.037-04:00

The early weeks of the fall term is a very critical period for establishing which classes citywide are too large, and of course there's the year-round issue of keeping track of student attendance. Troubles with the DoE data systems have been mucking up the whole lot.

As to the issue of class size, the UFT sent a directive to all chapter leaders early in the term asking them to make sure principals equalized their registers by the tenth day of school (Sept. 15th). That's so it could file for arbitration on any violations of the class size limitations set out in Article 7M of the contract.

You can tell the size of your registers using your daily and weekly bubble sheets generated by ATS (Automate the Schools), which is defined by the DoE as:

A school-based administrative system which standardizes and automates the collection and reporting of data for all students in the New York City Public Schools. It provides for automated entry and reporting of citywide student biographical data; on-line admissions, discharges, and transfers; attendance; grade promotion; pupil transportation and exam processing; and many other functions. In addition, it has a school-based management component that supplies aggregate student data, human resources data, and purchasing information for use by school administrators and school-based management committees.

There might be other ways to determine class size, but as a teacher I only have access to the ATS printouts (that we're given for attendance-taking) and to ARIS. We can't access HS Scheduling and Transcripts (HSST), which is another data system used for scheduling, grade reporting, and transcripts.

These data systems control the information teachers need for two important things that affect how well they can teach and what they can be criticized for by not monitoring: oversized classes and attendance.

With regard to attendance, we bubble our homeroom class attendance onto daily ATS forms and all our other classes (including the homeroom once again) on weekly ones. The system is programmed to make automatic changes so that being absent in your class doesn't have to mean a student is absent for the whole day.

Our personal record-keeping, on hard copy rosters or Delaney cards, is a necessary duplication of this task and one that annoys everyone. (A colleague asks a very simple question, which I’ll just throw in here: If a school has scanners, and many do, why do teachers have to take attendance on bubble sheets at all? Kids can scan themselves into the building, THE END. If you learn they’re cutting your particular class, which they can tell you on a periodic printout, call home.)

This year, my registers were more unstable than usual . . .

. . . and there were other issues I've never seen before, such as students appearing or disappearing from the ATS sheets when I had actually seen printouts of schedules they’d just been given. Of course these should match — at least by Friday afternoon, when a new ATS set is printed for the following week. But, they didn’t always, and sometimes the changes were not showing up on the daily sheets either.

I had just about had it trying to take attendance on the bubble sheets by early October. It was a such mess that I checked two other data bases used by my school that teachers can get into: a local one that has to be manually updated from ATS by the tech person (which he tries to do daily) and the famous ARIS, which is supposed to tell you everything about your students.

Lo-and-behold, they neither matched each other or the set of ATS sheets I'd been given for the week. In fact, what ARIS produced was a list from Mars, including dozens of students whose names I had never even seen before. So, I just gave up with the databases and wrote the tech person at my school for advice on how to take attendance.

For the uninitiated, it is terribly inconvenient to teach students you can't precisely determine as your own.

Yet, we’re told all the time that attendance-taking is serious business. A big bad student may cut out of the building and get into trouble somewhere in the community and our records could be used in the investigation, blah, blah, blah. No one knows if that is true, but teachers can and do get those irreversible Letters in the File when admin tells us to do something and we don’t do it. So, if we're directed to call the parents about non-appearance or cutting, we really want to take care of it. Naturally, it's a terrible waste of time to work from inaccurate class lists. It's also sometimes a hazard, as long as power-wielding principals have the right to discipline us for anything that comes into their adversarial minds.

What I have learned is this

In early October, schools were informed that the DoE had done an "upgrade" of its systems and none of the data bases were actually "talking to each other." The system was apparently changed on Sept. 25th, and “nothing relating to ATS worked.”

Two people I’ve spoken with on this could not understand why upgrades weren’t done in the summer when attendance was low (summer school) or non-existent (vacation). Why wait until September when the DoE is contractually obliged to cough up real data on oversized classes?

I learned that HSST was changed to STARS, which is now being used by all high schools and some middle schools citywide. (I can’t find the term “STARS” on the DoE website or anywhere else: if someone knows, please respond in comments so we all can learn something). Two or three weeks of attendance was not getting printed correctly, and I was told that at on a certain number of days, all of last year’s graduates and discharged kids were now sitting in this year’s registers — having been given full schedules to boot! At that point, every class was over the contractual limits.

I have since seen a copy of the “ATS News” for Oct. 9th, in which the DoE reports the following (typos theirs, not mine):

HIGH SCHOOL ROSTERS: ATS prints daily attendance rosters based on data that we receive from HSST/STARS. The latest file we received was from 9/26/09. If the rosters appear to be using that older [word missing] it is because HSST/STARS was unable to pass ATS an updated file. They are working very hard to see that the newest schedules are passed to us.

That schools were not made aware of these problems until two weeks after they occurred is a disgrace.

(NOTE: On the same Oct. 9th "ATS News" there’s also this item, but I am not sure what these scan sheets are and whether the problem they’re talking about is very large and/or important:

INDICATOR SCAN SHEETS: We have rectified a problem with indicator scanning where the bubbled forms were not updating ATS. The fix for this problem was implemented during the evening of October 7, 2009. If your school has experienced this problem Please regenerate and bubble the indicator scan sheet then scan them in. They should now update correctly.)

Class sizes bigger than ever, but how would anyone really know?

In the Sept. 13th issue of The Sun, Elizabeth Greene reported that the state was asking the DoE to explain “how it failed to reach its own goal of reducing class sizes” with the money it had given them to do that. The DoE’s response was that its progress was “substantial” and they'll get back with more information. I wonder.

In the Sept. 23rd issue of the Queens Gazette, Dan Miller reported the following figures based on UFT information: 7,419 oversized classes citywide at the start of the year (5,450 in HSS, and 1,969 in all the rest), leaving some 225,000 students in these classes for all or part of each day.

In the Oct. 12th issue of the Daily News, Clare Trapasso said Queens bore the brunt of the overcrowding, holding more than half of the city’s then 6,749 oversized classes, which is up from last year.

A TJC spokesperson reports that in one high school they are taking no-show students off registers to put them “who-knows where rather than create additional classes.” I have wondered the same thing, as I see names come and go from my registers almost every day since school started.

How the city calculates class size was discussed by Arthur Goldstein’s in his Oct. 15th Gotham Schools post, and parent advocate Leonie Haimson (Class Size Matters) says she's been working on anomalies for a while now. She believes the system is inherently faulty. It’s set up to record two classes where only one exists (e.g., CTT/inclusion classes, and any two "sections” of the same course that meet in the same room at the same time with the same teacher), “which has the effect of bringing down reported class sizes below their actual levels. After two years of advocates warning about this issue, the DoE still has not fixed this problem."

You can actually find reports of anomalies and technological screw-ups going back years. The New York Observer reported on these last July, and JD2718 talked about tech issues on Sept. 6th of 2008:

As schools scramble to balance class sizes and give schedules to new students, the New York City Department of Education's computer scheduling system sputtered and stalled due to secret modifications . . . Every year since it was introduced, HSST has had September problems, and stalls or halts at least once. We understand, it is by design, the Department of Education steadfastly refuses to acquire sufficient servers for peak-load. It is “brown-out as a way of life.”

But this year? Boom! Three days without reports. Even reports on the “clients” failed. And it wasn’t the normal accident.

More than four years ago, on June 8th of 2005, Samuel Freedman wrote about HSST snafus in an article called "The System Is Down. Is That a Problem?" His answer at the time was: "It is, quite simply, too soon to tell."

But, it’s bloody well not too soon to tell anymore.

If Ms Haimson and others suspect incompetence and/or the “failure to properly align or update their enrollment systems,” I suspect worse.

In this era of Ed Deform, whose proponents push and pay for mammoth data systems, transparency, and accountability, another explanation for such enormous problems is entirely within reason: the BloomKlein DoE is intentionally mucking up attendance and enrollment to avoid responsibility, not only for the oversized classes, but for issues relating to special ed services and attendance — all of which have to do with money and political will. With the amounts the DoE spends, you just can’t have these entirely fixable kinds of mistakes year after year.

It's also acting irresponsibly to their employees, the teachers (who serve in loco parentis to some extent), and to parents, who have the right to know precisely where their kids are when they send them off to school.

And our Union?

They are certainly not making a stink about the faulty technology, the inane directives to teacher members regarding attendance, or all that time-consuming and duplicative attendance-keeping.

They're either falling for the DoE's excuses or they're complicit in the charade.

BLOOMBERG MUST GO — far from New York City

2009-10-22T19:37:00.007-04:00

ICE Statement on the Nov. 3, 2009 Vote for Mayor

The election on November 3rd will have lasting consequences for public education and the city. It deserves the attention and involvement of all New Yorkers. The UFT has a long history of candidate endorsements made without any regular process of consultation with the membership and often contrary to members' interests. The decision to sit out the contest between Michael Bloomberg and his opponents speeds us to the brink of more disasters. If appearances are real and the UFT leadership's passive support for the mayor's reelection is a deal for a new UFT contract by deadline, our union is deeply complicit in another landmark defeat for the teaching profession.

Nearly eight years of direct control over the schools have provided Bloomberg with an unchecked opportunity to implement numerous policies premised on distrust and contempt for teachers, students and school communities. Early on with his rush to implement grade retention policy he put the blame on 8-year olds for low reading scores and further worked to make standardized testing a year-round concern. “Weekend, vacations, summer — time off is a luxury earned, not a right,” he told a radio audience in 2002. Chancellor Klein went to work making testing an obsession for all schools by hanging their fate on it.

His administration accelerated the wholesale closing of neighborhood high schools. Together with a successful assault on teachers' contractual rights this led to the creation of an excess teacher reserve force in the thousands. The result of dozens of school phase-outs deepened the gulf between the two worlds children in New York encounter at the high school level. One consists mostly of large neighborhood or selective schools and is increasingly filled with white and Asian students An entirely different realm awaits black and Latino students consisting mostly of new small schools, stripped of both enrichment programs, IEP services and bilingual programs and plagued with teacher turnover.

The new schools have been staffed with discriminatory hiring through privately-run programs. Just as tens of millions in funding by Bill Gates went to school reorganizations, Eli Broad's millions were used to train principals to see teachers as antagonists. In recent years Bloomberg and Chancellor Joel Klein have extended the agenda of privatized education by embracing charter schools, displaying a marked preference for the chain operators. Their favoritism towards the charters has allowed them to invade neighborhood schools and shrink them.

For educational activists the past eight years have meant not only palpable damage but also lost opportunity for positive and progressive change. The Bloomberg monopoly of power has excluded local participation in decision making, eliminating a common entry into politics by Black and Latino New Yorkers. It has also preempted meaningful discussion around educational goals and policy. What should be the goals of a public education? How can schools do more just provide an exit from the poorest communities? How could schools be part of a collective effort to improve neighborhoods and increase democracy?

Bill Thompson has played an important role as city comptroller in exposing Bloomberg-era fraud and mismanagement. His supporters are waging a spirited fight against a billionaire mayor with lopsidedly less resources. It is difficult to offer Thompson unqualified support when he has thrown support to mayoral control and supports much of the underlying corporate agenda for education. The mayoral race this year also attracted Tony Avella (who Thompson defeated) and Billy Palen who is running as the Green Party candidate. Both advocated a more grassroots response to the current mess and it's a shame Thompson didn't adopt some of their policies in his campaign against the mayor.

Despite these differences anything other than energetic rejection of the Bloomberg monopoly is the wrong choice for our union.

We urge all readers to vote against Bloomberg!

Published at the ICE blogs and website: UFT Elections 2010, ICE Blog, and ICE main website.

On hold for good reasons

2009-09-19T12:19:00.024-04:00

I continue to blog less than I used to —

NOT because I've become bored with the subject . . .

NOT because I don't have things to say about the coup in NYC education we've witnessed, come to understand, suffered through, and written about for seven or eight years . . .

NOT because I've given up on unionism . . .

and NOT because I have become any less of an activist . . .

It's because I don't have the time, and that's because

HIGH SCHOOL MUSIC TEACHERS
get 50 kids per class 5 times a day.
Total: 250 students to be
accounted for on a daily basis,
whether they show up or not.

The picture up above is what 50 kids looks likes (plus the teacher in the back row). Who cares if it's in India, it's a good visual.

My registers this past week have been fluctuating between 50 and 53 kids as things are getting worked out. When I mentioned this to one of the highest officials in our "pro-active" union (I say that with tongue in cheek), his response was something like: "The principal doesn't have to give you that many kids," as if it were my fault my classes are this large.

Do I have to remind him that the likelihood of any principal in this city putting fewer than 50 kids in a high school music class to improve the quality of education is about zero?

The UFT fails to accept responsibility for this. It's somehow the DoE's fault, or in this case, the principal's, that the numbers are so high. But, who do these union execs think they're kidding? It's they who negotiated this contract, unless they all went to the bathroom when it came time to rethink Article VII.M.2.g. At any rate, no one's ever explained the purpose of putting 50 in a music class, and my gut feeling is that their bottom line is: Shut up. You're lucky you have a position.

So, the glorious summer vacation is Over with a capital O, and I've been bubbling duplicate attendance rosters and marking reams of classwork straight through the morning commute and all my preps, lunch hours, and cafeteria duty, on the subway going home, during happy hour, and halfway through Keith Olbermann. That's when I usually just fall asleep.

I won't bother anyone with the detailed letter I sent the union about these numbers. I've complained about them before, and though Weingarten said she'd look into some "non-contractual relief" for music teachers, nothing was ever done. The official I recently wrote to says he is looking into it, but "nothing" is what will continue to happen as the execs fall in line with pattern bargaining and give away some other hard-fought stuff in our current contract.

So, I was thinking that as long as I'm not posting much these days, I should at least have something here that relates to another issue that's not going away any time soon. ATRs.

You can read the full post on the handbook I wrote for ATR subs over at "Surviving limbo," but here's the manual itself, with a few current changes.

I wish I could say it was no longer needed.

THE ATR HANDBOOK

[Note: This manual was written mostly for per diem subs.
Even if you've been given full or partial programs, a lot of this still applies.]

Part I: THE MINDSET

1. You are an inconvenience to your administrators and are essentially being tolerated. Do not try to be a goody-goody or get them to like your work, because bottom line, they don't actually want you on their budget.
[NEW COMMENT: Of course, if you're being paid out of central, they probably DO want you, but not enough to take you in properly.]

2. Do what is educationally sound at all times. That's the only way you'll be able to sleep at night.

3. You are a place holder, not a place filler. You are in someone else's room doing what you can with someone else's lesson for someone else's students, a situation which lasts for the duration of that person's absence.

4. Know that you the only person in the building being asked to "wing it," and no ed school ever taught you how. In the wonderworld of BloomKlein, your job specification has just shifted, and whether you like it or not, you're now a Jack-of-All-Trades, particularly in the HSS with all those specialized classes. Either enjoy, or . . .

5. Detach. Students might be cold-hearted, either unwittingly ("Hey, Miss, did you get downgraded or somethin'?") or purposefully ("F— you. You not a real teacher.") They can also be delightful, like the girl at the bus stop who shouted enthusiastically to her friend: "Hey, there's my substitute!" You are neither a sub-order of teacher or fabulous. You are doing your job to the best of your ability under volatile circumstances.

Part II: WHAT YOU'LL NEED TO CARRY WITH YOU

1. Class registers. Oh, how the intruder types love subs, and what a run-around they can give you.

2. Pens, pencils: but get collateral if you lend them, because they'll walk out with them and when they remember to return them, you've moved to another room.

3. Wordfinds, math puzzles, crossword puzzles, scrap paper. There'll be days when the teacher has left you nothing, and when kids are bored enough, some will take whatever you're handing out.

4. Chalk, eraser, dry erase pens. Don't rely on the teacher's supply.

5. List of school phone numbers, like for security, guidance counselors, the program office.

PART III: PROCEDURES

1. Have kids sign in on a separate sheet. Bubbling comes later, at your convenience and when you've had a chance to reflect over the legitimacy of the signatures.

2. Assign work immediately. Better still: write the assignment on the board before they get there and don't even open your mouth. Teens respond better when they're not being told by you to do anything.

3. Announce that you'll help anyone who needs it.

4. Then help a few of them, or at least look at what they're doing over their shoulder. Send a message that you're not just a disinterested bystander. It will convince some of undecided characters to crack a book.

5. Standard behavior for immature classes is to test the sub, and they can be merciless. So, it's now time to annotate that sign-in sheet. Look really serious when you do this, as if the mark you're giving them really means something. Tell one person he gets a check because he's working, another a half-check for not working so hard, or NW for No Work at all. Give your own marks for anything you can think of: being disruptive, intruding (contact Security to remove these kids), breaking school rules (don't contact Security for these because you'll annoy them, but you can write the student up later and let other people handle it).

6. A malicious child can really hurt you, but remember this. There are Chancellor's Regs on abuse to protect the student, but you won't find any regulations for the kind of abuse substitutes are frequently subjected to. In BloomKlein, teachers are abusers, students are . . . well, just kids.

7. Put the room in good order when you leave and the work in a neat pile. It's like wampum: you're trading a bit of effort for a bit of good feeling, and you'll be needing as much of that as you can get.

Part IV: DOCUMENT EVERYTHING, for example:

1. When no assignment has been left for you
2. The kids who enter late
3. When kids sign the attendance sheet, then cut out
4. Dangerous items left around the room (broken glass, formaldehyde, etc.)
5. Ripped books
6. Security not arriving if you've called them
7. An AP or principal walking into the room, for whatever reason
8. A kid's tirade of vulgar, aggressive words. It might get worse before it stops, but it will stop, especially when the rest of the class sees the humor (i.e., the stupidity) of it.

Part V: HONE YOUR TECHNIQUES, and SHARE THEM!

Greg Palast's new war

2009-09-13T12:12:00.006-04:00

Someone suggested at a meeting a couple of years to sic Greg Palast on BloomKlein and let him do what he does best: connect the dots.

I'm glad to have been alerted now to his Sept. 6th post on "No Child's Behind Left," where he turns his attention to educational malpractice American-style.

Palast's remarks on Title I caught my attention, because when they told us at a faculty meeting last June that all NYC schools were now going to be classified as Title I schools, I couldn't see why. I thought Title I meant low-income, and some schools in the city don't fall into that category.

In fact, the ESEA (Elementary and Secondary Education Act) that set up Title I funding in 1965, and re-authorized it every five years up until NCLB (the 2001 re-enacted version), was designed to get some extra money out to schools with a high percentage of students from low-income families.

Federal guidelines allow school boards to set that limit between 35% and 75%. NYC had been setting it at 40%, but it's now been lowered, and now the whole system gets to be Title I.

As I say, I didn't understand why the whole city was going Title I, but here's the dots Palast connects for me:

In this flat, tilted new world, we have to adopt the methods used by emperors of Confucian China: Test for the best, cull the rest.

Of course, not everyone takes the same test. Only "Title 1" schools must test students: working class and poor schools. The wealthiest suburban districts are exempt and all schools where students wear designer blazers. It's true that our President took a test to get into Yale. It had one question: "Was your grandfather, Prescott Bush, a Yale Trustee?" His answer, "Yes," gave him a perfect score. No Child Left offers no "options" for those with the test score Mark of Cain — no opportunities, no hope, no plan, no funding. Rather, it is the new social Darwinism, the marketplace jungle brought into the classroom. This is educational eugenics: Identify the nation's loser class early on. Trap them, then train them cheap. Someone has to care for the privileged. No society can have winners without lots and lots of losers.

And so we have No Child Left Behind — to provide the new worker drones that will clean the toilets at the Yale Alumni Club, punch the cash registers color-coded for illiterates, and pamper the winner class on the higher floors of the new economic order.

To clarify a bit (though the people who read this post probably wouldn't need any clarification at all), NCLB requires annual standardized testing to all students, but those who get Title I funding must make Adequate Yearly Progress. And here's a very clear definition of AYP (underlining mine):

Every state education agency is required to determine which schools do not meet AYP every year. However, a specific designation by the U.S. Department of Education called "Federal school improvement status" applies only to schools that receive Title I funds. State education agencies are required to determine what larger goals are required of every school as they fail to perform annually.

Title I schools that do not meet AYP for two consecutive years are placed in "School Improvement Status" and must offer alternative school attendance opportunities to students within their schools. If these same schools do not make AYP for three consecutive years, they must offer both alternative school attendance opportunities and opportunities for students to increase their learning outside of school time. If those schools miss AYP for a fourth consecutive year, they are designated as being in "Corrective Action" and must choose among strategies outlined by NCLB. A fifth year of missing AYP results in restructuring planning year when the school is shut down, and then a sixth year of missing AYP requires that the restructuring plan be implemented.

NCLB restructuring options include:
• Chartering: Closing and reopening as a public charter school.
• Reconstitution: Replacing school staff, including the principal, relevant to the failure in the school.
• Contracting: contracting with an outside entity to operate the school.
• State takeovers: turning the school operations over to the state education agency.
• Any Other: engaging in another form of major restructuring that makes fundamental reforms.
The option of extending NCLB-required sanctions to non-Title I schools does exist; however, there is little current research indicating the implementation of this practice.

In other words — let's not bother with chartering, reconstituting, contracting, and taking over schools in the burbs. The teachers in those schools are just fine, everyone's on task doing great. Not that I wish the heavy hand of the BushBama to come down on them like it's been happening here in NYC. It's more like I wish we had the smaller classes (that they refuse to give us) and the freedom to teach (that they refuse to allow) so we can do our job.

With school districts given the Congressional right to decide how they would set Title I eligibility, there's some question as to why the whole city — which is really a conglomeration of many towns and villages — had to all become Title I.

Part of the answer (maybe all of it) lies in that AYP business. The DoE now has free reign not only to test mercilessly, but to restructure, close schools instead of fix them, charterize, and contract out whatever bits suits them — which is what this game is all about.

NCLB hasn't been the only federal passport to EdDeform. In a press release last May 11th, the government announced that NYS was going to get a couple of billion more dollars under the new American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. In order to receive those funds, though, the state would have to provide

assurances that it will collect, publish, analyze and act on basic information regarding the quality of classroom teachers, annual student improvements, college readiness, the effectiveness of state standards and assessments, progress on removing charter caps, and interventions in turning around underperforming schools.

The jump from getting more ed dollars to help out low-income populations (1965) to creating national standards of so-called achievement and quality (2001 and later) is complicated and disingenuous.

Patrick McGuinn tries to capture this in his book on ed policy for the past 40 years. As he says in the introduction:

The original ESEA was narrowly targeted (to disadvantaged students), focused on inputs (providing additional resources to schools), and contained few federal mandates. In contrast, NCLB embraces a much broader scope . . . focused on outputs (measuring academic performance) . . .

A review of the book says that McGuinn argues

[NCLB] signaled the clear emergence of a new policy regime that had been building since 1988. No longer do federal policymakers simply focus on ensuring equity for disadvantaged students and monitoring policy inputs . . . Rather, McGuinn sees a fundamentally new regime that now stresses excellence for all students, backed by high-stakes accountability for results. That shift, McGuinn notes, was built by conservatives and liberals who charted a middle path while sidestepping the preferences of key interest groups in their respective coalitions.

I love those middle paths we're charting and have written about them recently (here).

Since it's not possible that all conservatives and liberals in this country are either business people looking for cheap, mildly educated labor or military commanders looking for war fodder, I am wondering what it will take for them to see that ideology without basis doesn't get our disadvantaged kids up and running.

Electoral hardware: another arm of the privatization monster

2009-09-08T22:02:00.010-04:00

With all the talk of privatization of the public school system, it's easy to lose sight of all the other ways corporations are changing the way our government operates.

Naomi Klein spoke a couple of years ago about the "faulty logic of the Bush administration's vision of a hollowed-out government run everywhere possible by private contractors":

According to this radical vision, contractors treat the state as an ATM, withdrawing massive contracts to perform core functions like securing borders and interrogating prisoners, and making deposits in the form of campaign contributions. As President Bush's former budget director, Mitch Daniels, put it: "The general idea — that the business of government is not to provide services but to make sure that they are provided — seems self-evident to me."

It's happening with our electoral system as well.

Some watchdog groups are examining the machines NY and other state governments are being persuaded to purchase. They're scared, and they're calling for people to get involved.

The message I received from one of these groups invites you to learn more about the ramifications of turning over our electoral system to contractors and their optical scanning technology:

Our state expects a deficit this year over $2 billion.
In 3 years our expected deficit is $18 billion.

In spite of this, we are moving ahead to privatize our elections with expensive paper ballots and optical scanners (vote-counting computers).

New York counties have already objected to proper security for the paper ballots and scanners because security is too expensive.

There are two sessions being offered:

Sat., Sept. 12, 12:30-4 PM, 28 E. 35th St. between Park and Madison Aves in Manhattan
Saturday, Sept. 26, 1:30-4:30, 40 E. 35 St. between Park and Madison Aves in Manhattan

Anyone can attend, just RSVP via email or phone (Teresa Hommel, 212 228-3803) and include your phone number.

More info at these links: Legislative Memo , 186 Failures of optical scanners, and WheresThePaper.org

Neoliberalconservatism

2009-08-25T09:00:00.042-04:00

Obama's "Race to the Top" initiative, which is like a sledgehammer whacking ed deform deeper into public policy, is the conflation of at least three philosophies, if not more.

Neoliberalism. The first of these definitions sounds tame, the second like a hungry beast:

"a political orientation originating in the 1960s; blends liberal political views with an emphasis on economic growth"
wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn

"The policies of privatization, austerity, and trade liberalization dictated to dependent countries by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank as a condition for approval of investment, loans, and debt relief." (6)
www2.truman.edu/~marc/resources/terms.html

Neoconservatism. The first makes you feel uncomfortable, the second is terrifying.

"A right wing political movement that opposes liberalism in political, economic and social fields."
en.wiktionary.org/wiki/neoconservatism

"Neocons - Neoconservatism is a political philosophy that emerged in the United States of America, and which supports using American economic and military power to bring liberalism, democracy, and human rights to other countries."
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neocons

Liberalism. A virtual potpourri of economic and social elements, such as:

The quality of being liberal; Any political movement founded on the autonomy and personal freedom of the individual, progress and reform, and government by law with the consent of the governed; An economic theory in favour of laissez faire and the free market
en.wiktionary.org/wiki/liberalism

"broad, large-minded, tolerant"
"having political or social views favoring reform and progress"
wordnetweb.princeton.edu

And all this doesn't seem strange anymore, because since Obama's been in office, he's morphed.

Gone are the autonomy, personal freedom, broadmindedness and tolerance.

Being fixed in stone is an opposition to all that – plus privatization and an imperialistic federal government that dictates policy to the states. (Who needs State Ed Depts anymore, come to think of it.)

Much to think about, but it feels like a tsunami.

Cartoon credits:
Neo-liberalism: azlanmclennan.com
Neoconservatism: pissedonpolitics.com
Liberal: cafebabel.com
The New Yorker, which I'm very angry with for the Steven Brill article

Since this blog is on hold while there's much to do at the school level against the threats to NYC public education, I'm leaving this reminder of the kind of battle we're in.

Danny Weil's essay in Counterpunch, from whence these two paragraphs:

Neoliberalism, Charter Schools and the Chicago Model
Obama and Duncan's Education Policy:
Like Bush's, Only Worse

. . . What the Obama administration is doing, in tandem with the Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, is part and parcel of typical neo-liberal policy making: wielding federal stimulus funds as a financial weapon to force all states to increase the amount of charter schools they host as well as force those states that do not have them to pass legislation authorizing them. Through financial arm-twisting at a time of disastrous economic crisis, the Obama administration plans to use the power of the federal government to create a much larger national market for charter school providers, be they for profit or non-profit, virtual charters, EMOs or single operators.

This is deeply troubling, for many states which do not want charter schools or have found the experiment to be less than adequate and in fact damaging to kids and funding, for traditional public schools will now be forced to choose stimulus money over policy, a form of economic extortion and increased federal and corporate control over decision making, especially at a time when many of these states are literally financial insolvent. This is another example of how disaster politics operates, only this time the disaster is not a natural disaster but an economic disaster that threatens public policies.

Is anyone feeling like I am that we've been ripped off by this presidency?

Wearing the right shoes

2009-08-11T08:03:00.010-04:00

Frank Rich in the NY Times last Sunday got it exactly right when he said there's a "sinking sensation that the American game is rigged," that the system is in hock to lobbyists and the very, very rich.

I take this very much to heart. In fact, I am way past that "sinking" sensation and know to the bone how entirely rigged this American game is.

The editorial boards of the largest NY papers are caught up in the same sphere of influence, and they've pretty much abandoned the notion of unbiased reporting. A disappointment, but no surprise anymore.

Fortunately, the gap in reportage is being filled by some tireless activists, which means as long as you own a computer, you'll never be more than an hour or two away from the latest education news. These people connect the dots, provide links to other scholarship and muckraking, and tell you when it's time to take direct action.

My warmest and most heartfelt thanks for doing this for us goes to Ednotes (Norm Scott), NYC Educator (NYC Educator), and NYC Public School Parents (Leonie Haimson), a virtual dream team of bloggers. There's also the indefatiguable GothamSchools produced by The Open Planning Project.

I will not include in this list what should have been there all along: Edwize and the NY Teacher, the ethically challenged arms of the UFT/Unity Caucus.

As for myself, I've learned this summer that I've got to come off the computer and spend my non-teaching time in civic protest. There's no other way I'll be able to feel comfortable in my own shoes.

Looking for Michael B.

2009-07-25T21:49:00.045-04:00

Summertime for me usually means reading Tom Stoppard, but let’s face it: There’s nothing like Shakespeare to help you understand the mind of a despot.

I’m talking about Richard III, though I’m sure anyone who knows me probably thought I meant Michael Bloomberg.

When Al Pacino came out with his documentary Looking for Richard in 1996, he had spent four years poking around the soul of that hideous king. The film is fascinating if you’re looking for insights into the psychology of New York's ruling class.

Take the remark Vanessa Redgrave makes in the film, that "those in power have total contempt for everything they promise, everything they pledge,” and then review the list of Bloomberg statements about running for a 3rd term:

"The people themselves have twice explicitly voted for term limits. We cannot ignore their will. They want the openness new faces bring. And they will get it. We will not go back.” (2002)

“I would oppose any change in the law that a legislative body tries to make.” (2002)

“There’s no organization that I know that would put somebody in charge for a long period of time. You always want turnover and change. Eight years is great. You learn for four years. You can do for four years." (2002)

"I think it would be an absolute disgrace to go around the public will." (2005)

"I always thought term limits were a good idea. I am not trying to overturn term limits." (2008) [credit to www.youreadisgrace.com]

Contempt, yes. There's also the greasing. For example, the Independence Party — “Asked if the mayor had pledged a specific amount of money to support the party this year, Salit was understandably coy. The mayor had assured them that ‘ample resources will be brought to bear,’ she said with a smile. In Bloomberg talk, this is always a seven-figure number.” Or the people who find real estate projects a piece of cake these days — look at image 2 in this link when it zips by, which shows how they're planning to build 4 big towers in the Coney Island acreage that’ll block the sun for the next 200 years.

Barbara Everett, a Shakespeare scholar Pacino interviews in the film, suggests that "Everybody may have a price, but for a lot of people there is a fundamental decency. It takes quite a long time for them to reach that point. The action of the play, the sense of exciting movement, is Richard's finding the point" — or in real time, the moment the pandering and corruption stops.

Bloomberg may be getting his kicks from straddling the line between legal and illegal, moral and immoral. He certainly doesn’t need the cash.

Richard, Everett continues, is "bound to be left alone, because nobody can love the king beyond the degree of their own egoism, or perhaps their own goodness. There’s going to be a point.”

Well, New Yorkers are sure waiting a long time for that point, the one when enough legislators and council members break away from the mayor’s contemptible grip to vote for something relating to public education that makes sense. It hasn't happened up in Albany, and it's not happening down here either. A few perhaps, but not enough of them.

Says Richard when Buckingham asks him to make good on his promises:

"I’m not in the giving vein."

Neither is Bloomberg. He’s locked out parents and educators for eight years, and if he’s handing them a few crumbs this past week, it’s because he was forced to. He wants that third term.

Al’s producer, Michael Hadge, suggests Richard is a man who in the end “knows that he does not have his own humanity. That he’s lost it, that he has let the pursuit of power totally corrupt him, and that he is alienated from his own body and his own self.”

To my mind, so is Bloomberg, else how could he as a Jew compare anything going on in the Senate these days to the failed policy of appeasing the Nazis. That’s losing your own self big time in my book.

At the end of the play, King Richard comes to terms with his self-loathing, and he doesn’t hide behind a cloak of insanity when he openly convicts himself in Act V, scene iii:

"Alas, I rather hate myself
For hateful deeds committed by myself.
I am a villain.
Every tale condemns me for a villain.
And if I die, no soul shall pity me.
Nay, wherefore should they?"

I think Bloomberg’s not there yet, because he’s still an arrogant son of a bitch. But as Everett says about Richard, "Although he’s frightfully clever, he’s at the same time like a kind of boar who has subsumed into himself all these frightful animal images. And all the rest have got to do is hunt the boar, and that’s what they do. And they get him."

We’ll never be able to “get” Bloomberg for the crimes he’s already committed against half a generation of NYC school children. But we can get him OUT, for as Richmond puts it:

"England hath long been mad and scarred herself." (V, v)

Not one shred less than New York, methinks, when scoundrels rule and people beflower the paths they tread.

Now for some levity . . .

2009-07-24T20:36:00.016-04:00

. . . while New York slugs it out with a mayor we were never meant to have.

A NEW FILM: "A blogger turned stand-up comic, an obsessive political gadfly and a high-school math teacher compete against each other and arch rival incumbent Michael Bloomberg for the post of New York City mayor."

Click to see the trailer.

And this, about saving Coney Island from robber barons.

Click on Dick
(below)
for an important
video message!

Obama's double-take

2009-07-17T17:28:00.026-04:00

If you haven't seen this video clip on Obama's July 16th speech at the NAACP, here it is:

"And let me say this. If Al Sharpton, Mike Bloomberg, and Newt Gingrich can agree that we need to solve the education problem, then that's something all of America can agree we can solve. [clap, clap, clap]

"Those guys came into my office . . . [pause for irony] . . . just sitting in the Oval Office, I kept on doing a double-take.
[mimics his own disbelief, laughter, clap, clap, clap]

"But that's a sign of progress . . .

Progress?

I would like to say Obama doesn't get it, but he's way too smart. With both feet planted square in the neocon agenda, he and his Secretary buddy Arne "Non-Educator" Duncan have been working overtime on creating a feeding frenzy for public monies.

The cash is going to charters without a doubt, even though nobody says what the big deal is with these schools. The only thing I can tell is that they get to keep the class size down and pick their students. That doesn't cut it with the masses, the people whose dreams were once tied up with putting this president into the White House.

Sharpton, Gingrich and Bloomberg — not an educator among them. Just a trio of dissemblers with a nose for power and cash.

President Obama, I agree with you it's weird to see these guys sitting around the Oval Office, but what I can't get is why the heck were you in there with them?

Welcome to Lilliput

2009-07-14T13:18:00.072-04:00

NYC Educator brought up the word "liar" in a recent post, and I agree:
It's time to go there.

A few minutes after I got the latest flyer from the Bloomberg campaign, I found myself driving up the FDR and doing what the man in the movie Network told us to do. I rolled down the window and yelled out:

"I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore!"

Boy, did it feel good.

There is so much lying these days, and absolutely nobody should be taking it anymore. Particularly people who send their kids to public schools.

Across the front of that flyer there's this bold announcement: "New York's newspapers say: Mike Bloomberg is making PROGRESS in our schools." A nice trick when you think about it, to use quotes from a bunch of newspapers instead of facts.

Inside, a heading quotes from the Daily News: "New York public school students are achieving at unprecedented levels." Well, that's a lie right there — unless you take it to mean that literacy and math competence in our schools have reached an unprecedented low.

Then there are four big-print highlights of the mayor's "strong, independent leadership" and more newspaper quotes to back them:

GREATER ACCOUNTABILITY . . .

MORE PARENTAL INVOLVEMENT. . .

STANDING UP TO THE BUREAUCRACY . . .

HIGHER TEST SCORES AND GRADUATION RATES . . .

All lies. Flaming, outrageous, hugely expensive prevarications of a billionaire pol who has quite frankly crossed the line.

It's clear that the mainstream papers print what the Bloomberg pressroom sends them, because you can't publish something like this:

"Mr. Bloomberg has created clear lines of authority in this once-chaotic system and cut back a spreading bureaucracy that defied previous mayors. Judging by test scores, the city's students are benefiting." (the NY Times, Sept. 08)

without someone failing to check the facts and do some analysis.

Fortunately there are muckrakers and sharp-sighted eagles picking up the slack where the ostriches, sloths, and varmints at city newsdesks renege, and there are sites like this to remind you to re-read their posts.

For Bloomberg's claim about "GREATER ACCOUNTABILITY", read how Seung Ok and Steve Koss debunk Press Secretary David Cantor's claptrap on regents scoring over at Ednotes and Leonie Haimson's latest post on the resignation of the DoE's Chief Accountability officer, James Liebman ("the man had no qualifications for the job"). Eduwonkette did a whole week of posts on school report cards when they first came out (she covered strategy, flubs, theory and problems), and you can both laugh and cry at Celia Oyler's pop quiz on the same topic.

For his claim about "MORE PARENTAL INVOLVEMENT", see James Eterno's post on how parents had to fight to get a decision-making role at local schools after Klein marginalized them with a 2007 regulation. Then check out this G.E.M. post (earlier ones also) for stories of parents fighting back against BloomKlein's school closings and doing things specifically without their involvement.

For his claim about "STANDING UP TO THE BUREAUCRACY", that's baloney to start with. See Elizabeth Green in Gotham Schools for a frightening account of the three reorganizations of the system to date. How much more fiddling around with bureaucracy can the city take, or pay for?

And for his claim about "HIGHER TEST SCORES and GRADUATION RATES", there's tons on this already. Two good reads come to mind: Diane Ravitch's important testimony at the NYS Assembly on both these topics last February, and NYC Educator "Just the Facts." In fact, you can get a whole lot of other links about grad rates if you read Chaz's post, like he suggests in the comments.

I'm at the stage where rolling down a car window is not going to be nearly enough. It has to be louder, bigger, and pack a big punch.

But until all that comes together, I'll just keep thinking of Gulliver and how a whole lot of little people doing their thing can eventually bring a big guy down.

Barron and the art of protest

2009-07-08T08:48:00.045-04:00

For more on this demonstration, see the David Mark Greaves report "Parents Demand Voice in Education System."

If you were lucky enough to attend the rally at Tweed two days ago against BloomKlein malfeasance and thuggery, you would have been reminded of something we don't always see these days. People power.

About half an hour into event, Councilman Charles Barron led the crowd right up the steps to take the place back. Of course he stopped at the doors, and of course we all wished he'd barge right on in. Not this time, but we're getting there.

The sunsetted Department of Education did a miserable job of serving the people in spite of Bloomberg's cash-flow hype, and most know in their bones that the new so-called Board of Education is illegal.

It's clear there's no shortage of great speakers at any of the rallies these days. Some of the parents, teachers, and council people who've taken the mic have really been able to put our profound disgust into spine-tingling speech. [For more on our profound disgust, read Polo Colon here.]

Too bad, of course, that NONE of these speakers are Weingarten's people, and that's a fact. The staff she sends out to monitor these events all hover around the back edges in their Sunday best looking fairly muzzled — when they're not hob-nobbing with Tweedies, that is.

Thanks to NYCteachers.com, there's a video of part of the protest.

And here's a transcription of the text, because honestly, it's time we learn to start sounding like this to everyone who'll listen. So, practice up.

There’s no way on God’s earth can you get into the 21st century if you’re not teaching science,
if you’re not teaching computers, [someone yelled out History],
if you’re not teaching about the green economy,
if you’re not teaching about economics,
if you’re not teaching about leadership,
if you’re not teaching about the culture and the rich history of the African community,
if you’re not talking about the Latino community and their rich culture and their rich history.

So, we gotta say: We want a culturally relevant curriculum.
We want a curriculum— not some businessmen getting in a room and saying one-size curriculum fits all.

We say: You failed us, Mayor. You failed us, Chancellor.
And we come to make citizens’ arrests, because they are illegally ... illegally ... occupying this building.
THE MAYOR MUST GO!
THE MAYOR MUST GO!
THE MAYOR MUST GO!
THE CHANCELLOR MUST GO!
THE CHANCELLOR MUST GO!
THE CHANCELLOR MUST GO!

Finally, on this day, on this day ...

We the People ... [WE THE PEOPLE] ...
declare ... [DECLARE] ...
this Board of Education ... [THIS BOARD OF EDUCATION] ...
now belongs to the people ... [NOW BELONGS TO THE PEOPLE] ...
now belongs to the parents ... [NOW BELONGS TO THE PARENTS] ...
now belongs to the children ... [NOW BELONGS TO THE CHILDREN] ...
now belongs to the teachers that want to teach ... [NOW BELONGS TO THE TEACHERS THAT WANT TO TEACH] ...
And we support student unions.

So that’s the declaration we make here today.

This struggle will continue.
They’re not going to take our education system from us. We’re taking it back.

We will be back again, and again, and again
until they are gone.

Thank you very much.

Thank YOU, Councilman Barron. The pleasure hearing you speak was all ours.

Scott the pol

2009-07-01T07:06:00.066-04:00

Scott Stringer is sinking us.

I wrote him this morning out of disgust, particularly after taking a look at his website and learning he no longer needed the services of the clearest thinking man on Klein's PEP, Patrick Sullivan.

In my letter, I basically asked him what about mayoral control so pleased him these past 7 years.

As far as I could tell, it's been:

• chaotic (three reorganizations of the heirarchy in 7 years, busing fiasco,etc.),

• faked (manipulated test scores, an inscrutable school grading system, etc.).

• non-transparent (no-bid contracts, hidden liaisons with corporations, etc.),

• dictatorial (shutting parents and educators out of decision-making, the firings at the PEP meeting a couple of years ago over the tests, etc.), and at times

• irregular or unlawful (appointed an uncertified and non-educator chancellor who needed a waiver, broke up the districts into regions without court approval, etc.).

The borough president is not elected to do a mayor's bidding, which is what checks and balances are all about, and since we haven't had any checks and balances for the past seven years on mayoral dictates, Manhattan expects Stringer to start showing some muscle.

A full-out rejection of this mayor's irregularities, arrogance and downright incompetence running our schools would be a good start. Insisting that long-term educators get to make the important decisions should be another priority. At least they know in their bones that parent input counts.

What Stringer thinks about education can be read on his website. In light of his decision to continue backing mayoral control (a position he's taken all along, according to Lisa Donlon), I am concerned that he's become deaf to his own words:

However, there is widespread discontent with the councils and, in 2006, the Borough President released a report [Parents Dismissed] showing that the CECs have not received the support and training the DOE is supposed to provide in order to allow them to be effective.

He's also taken away our best shot for keeping the DoE clean. Failing to re-instate a real advocate for public education on the newly constituted board, we now get his general counsel (Jimmy Yan). What did tossing Sullivan get him? The public really wants to know.

Here's the part of Stringer's position paper that shows how well Bloomberg's PR machine achieved its primary goal, getting elected officials to believe the fabrications and not bother themselves with with due diligence.

New York City’s public school system has seen some improvement in recent years: in certain grades student achievement on standardized reading and math tests has posted notable gains; a modest gain in the high school graduation rate has been achieved; there is an ambitious capital plan that seeks to address overcrowding and facility deterioration; the number of gifted and talented and bilingual programs has increased; and additional accountability measures have been put in place.

Despite this progress . . .

. . . The chancellor has called tackling this achievement gap the major impetus behind new accountability and assessment measures and the most recent re-organization of the system.

In fact, the test score gains and graduation rates have all been debunked, overcrowding is worse than ever (they're still using trailers for classrooms), and there's no sign of a single instrument of accountability or assessment that doesn't leak like a sieve.

If as Stringer says "far too many students lack the most basic skills in reading and math" and "70,000 students each year do not graduate on time," keeping the BloomKlein edifice in place makes no sense. Unless you've sold out for something bigger.

It remains to be seen whether these changes in structure and funding will help close student achievement gaps. Likewise, it remains to be seen if the City’s new pilot program to pay parents and students for improved standardized test scores and good attendance will improve student performance.

If Stringer needs more time to see that this mayoral control thing isn't working, then Manhattan will definitely need to cut him loose.

The Age of Enlightenment on its way out

2009-06-30T08:20:00.021-04:00

There’s not a lot of agreement on what it means to be “enlightened,” but for starters we could look at back to the middle of the 18th century.

That would be a couple of decades before a handful of truly enlightened souls cobbled together a declaration of independence, and about 150 years before these united states committed to an education system funded by the public purse (1870).

Voltaire, according to some, thought the appeal of the new way of thinking boiled down to seven social and intellectual phenomena:

— the autonomy of reason
— perfectibility and progress
— confidence in the ability to discover causality
— principles governing nature, man and society
— assault on authority
— cosmopolitan solidarity of enlightened intellectuals, and
— a disgust with nationalism.

(Gerhard Rempel, Western New England College)

I could argue that the corporatist siege squeezing the moral life out of this country, perpetrated by heavily lobbied facilitators at every level of government, has maneuvered us in totally the opposite direction. We’ve abandoned all of Voltaire’s phenomena.

The Age of Enlightenment is well on its way out, and the ignorance, social chaos and repression of the Middle Ages are making a big comeback.

The campaign against Reason is spearheaded here in New York City by the mayor and his five-star general Joel Klein. They command a whole army of hastily trained-up staff sergeants from the Leadership Academy and a slew of corporate players bidding for pieces of the education pie.

BloomKlein campaigns best when the rest of us are overworked, apathetic or comatose. Shuffling things around under the guise of reform, they’ve come up with ill-conceived reorganizations, a perverted school grading system, falsified testing analyses, and some very strange notions of quality education.

These are the fabrications of an unenlightened oligarchy.

They don’t seek to understand or fix the underlying problems of the system — like overstuffed classrooms, too few experienced certified teachers, not enough school buildings, arts and phys ed programs, or services for special needs. They don’t listen to educators or parents, they intentionally place blame where it doesn’t belong, and they show little respect laws that get in their way.

Thumped for half a generation at least, we’ve learned how to keep taking it on the chin. We're becoming un-enlightened.

Across the country, being educated, articulate, and rational in thought has somehow become a bad thing. We’re still reeling from a federal administration that put nationalism at an all-time high and the ability to reason at an all-time low.

Nevertheless, the reasoning people among us are forever confident in the ability to discover causality, so we should be able to think this one through:

Oligarchs grab power when society allows them to. Enlightened people need to get out in the streets and stop them.

That’s what they did two hundred years ago, and that’s what they need to do now.

Just like what they've already been doing:

at P.S. 57 in Manhattan . . .
at P.S. 160 in the Bronx . . .
at IS 218 in East New York . . .
at IS 278 in Brooklyn . . .
At Bethel Church in Harlem . . .

The inimitable

2009-06-25T16:22:00.034-04:00

If you liked Norm Scott does Les Mis, you'll love this one.

It's a video clip of Norm doing his thing outside yesterday's Delegate Assembly, I'd say about an hour before Weingarten resigned.

SCOTT on WEINGARTEN'S AFT SELL-OUT TOUR

Crime down, PR up

2009-06-21T09:30:00.035-04:00

Over at GEM this week it was predicted that Bloomberg would quickly try to burnish his image once a report called The New Marketplace got published on Wednesday. The New School study showed that the larger high schools have not fared well during Tweed’s slash-and-burn strategy to create more and more small schools.

As it turns out, Bloomberg obliged and did mount a press conference at one of the big high schools: Truman — way up in the north Bronx. Accompanied by some very high-profile people, including Commissioner Kelly, the chancellor, UFT prez Randi Weingarten and her heir-apparent Michael Mulgrew, the mayor felt a strong urge to talk about the drop of crime in the city’s public schools.

I guess he chose Truman because it was one of the two large HSS cited favorably in the report under the heading “Leadership and Stability Matter”:

Some other large high schools managed to handle the side effects of school closings and growing numbers of new students without severe disruptions. Those with strong, stable leadership and a solid core of high-achieving students have been especially successful in coping with sharply higher enrollments. . . And when enrollment boomed at Harry S. Truman High School, there was initially a steep decline in attendance and graduation rates, but the school managed to rebound.

At some point during the conference, Bloomberg referred to a number of handouts graphing the decline in "major" crimes (burglary, grand larceny, and grand larceny auto) and "violent" crimes (homicide, rape, robbery, felony assault, misdemeanor assault, and sex offenses) in schools.

When a reporter asked why anyone should believe the numbers, Bloomberg apparently shot back something like: “Are you saying I’m lying?”

To which I'd have responded: “Duh!”

First, everyone knows there’s underreporting of incidents, by teachers and administrators. In the “gotcha” climate wrought by Tweed, no one likes to report incidents unless you have to — for insurance purposes. Sometimes it’s a matter of sullying the school’s image or your own. After all, if an incident happened while you were around to see it, maybe you weren't doing something right. I don’t know whether principal’s bonuses are affected by the number of incidents they report, but they may be. There’s also a question of being afraid to make a false statement (Did I really see that?), and in some cases fear, retaliation, and/or blowback.

Let it be known that both the UFT and the DoE use the word “incident” for a broad range of negative behaviors. Included in the union’s list are: “assaults, classroom disruptions, threats, and violent or dangerous behavior.” The official DoE Incident Report gives the following definitions on page 2:

In both lists, classroom disruption and misbehaving are as much “incidents” as assaults and violent behavior, and that’s weird. Remind me to file an incident report next time Johnny tells me to f... off when I tell him to stop pawing a girl and get to class.

It’s actually a little confusing to match Bloomberg's graphs with the comment made by Criminal Justice Coordinator Feinblatt in the press release:

Thanks to the collaboration between the Department of Education and the police, we have reduced the behaviors that disrupt our classrooms and hallways and prevent our students from concentrating and learning.

Someone really has to explain what the "behaviors that disrupt our classrooms and hallways” have to do with homicide, rape and other violent crimes — or, in fact, with the NYPD at all?

Behavior is controlled by good security leadership (which Truman has, I understand), adequate space to place kids while they calm down or serve suspensions, and most importantly, enough staff — aides, agents, and teachers on patrol — to do the job, inside the classroom and out in the common areas. Not all schools have all three, and they may very well suffer for it. For Bloomberg to leave teachers out of the security equation is strange. The press conference was by invitation only and it was reported only two teachers were in the room. That’s interesting, and distressing.

Getting back to the reporter’s question on the credibility of Bloomberg’s numbers, there’s this:

Massaging data to support a favorable school governance record has been a trademark of Klein’s chancellorship. In fact, it’s what the Tweed PR team actually do best.

Look how they've already manipulated test scores, school grading, and graduation rates — statistics that congressmen and city council members seem to accept without question regardless how frequently their conclusions have been shot down by ed analysts like Jennifer Jennings (aka Eduwonkette) and Fred Smith, historians like Ravitch and Meier , and brainy activist parents like Leonie Haimson (Class Size Matters).

Thank you, Mr. or Ms Reporter, for asking Bloomberg that question about believing his numbers. Maybe it made them think twice about broadcasting the conference all over the news.

And maybe the press is just not buying this stuff anymore. Fingers crossed.

Which brings me to Randi Weingarten, who once again greeted the mayor with a kiss.

Does that mean the new contract’s already in the bag?

Woof, woof!

2009-06-15T18:51:00.029-04:00

A parent recently contacted a couple of us to express a serious concern — one that I remember having when my own kids were attending public schools, here in NYC and in the suburbs.

She wrote:

I support your goals of supporting neighborhood schools, smaller class sizes and reducing high stakes testing.

Unfortunately, I disagree with you about teacher seniority. Our Principal is unable to replace a teacher who is ineffective simply because this teacher has seniority. This is not good for our schools or our children.

Here is how I answered this sticky question — given the circumstances teachers we're in dealing with this mayor, his thug of a chancellor, and our let's-play-dead union prez.

Dear Mrs. Parent,

I write to you as a long-time teacher in the school system.

In any profession, there are workers who are less "good" at their job than others, and in the private sector they can be fired at will.

But, in teaching and other civil service jobs, there are two ways already in place for terminating someone. There's a probationary period, 3 years for teachers, during which time administrators evaluate whether tenure should be granted. The teacher can be easily terminated once a principal decides he or she has little chance of success at the job.

If over time a teacher develops a questionable performance record, an principal can file 3020-a charges and the case goes up for review. Educators can also be hauled off to jail when the situation requires it, hopefully in the rarest of cases.

In a climate of union-bashing and corporate models of public school management, which we have here in New York for a decade, administrators are disregarding their contractual responsibilities and using instead some rather harsh techniques to remove not individual teachers, but categories of them from their budgets. These include:
— teachers who are competent in many or even all ways but who disagree with them,

— senior teachers, who cost way more then newer teachers. The situation is made worse for veterans because of the chancellor's decision to give principals more control over their budgets. Expensive teachers take a bigger chunk out of the budget, so principals think twice how many of them they want to keep around.

— unionists and activists, and

— whistleblowers.
When I say harsh, I refer to the so-called rubber rooms, where not only supposedly poorly performing teachers are sent for months or years until their cases are heard, but many others as well, of the kinds mentioned above. Regardless of the charge, putting a person in a rubber room to wait for a verdict is tantamount to deciding someone is guilty until he or she is proven innocent.

In the old days, if a teacher's judgment were called into question, he or she might be summoned to the principal's office for a "chat." Klein's corporate methodologies place no value on informal chats whatsoever. He has instead given administrators a neat set of tools to demolish the careers of people they don't want to deal with — even before a case is decided in favor or against.

We are finding out that most of the people sent to rubber rooms are at the end of their ordeal returned to a classroom. That is because "competency" is not a finite term, and in the cases mentioned above, it actually had never really been an issue in the first place. Some teachers are asked to pay a fine, which is frequently just a whimsical pay-to-play scheme.

If teachers sent to the rubber room choose to tolerate this "prison" environment from 9 to 3 every day, they'll continue to draw a salary. To some that is a fair exchange. Others resign. But, whatever they choose to do while they wait for their hearing, they endure this situation without actually being proven guilty of the charge against them. Even probable criminals are out on bail and free to continue working.

Some very strong, committed educators, union activists, and civil servants now have their careers in ruins because of Klein's methodologies.

We are not against decertifying people who clearly cannot teach. We seek, however, to establish some safeguards for people who are improperly marginalized by a non-educator chancellor and a union president who is very much a collaborator in the demise of public education, and who makes it clear she is not so willing to defend the contract that she herself negotiated.

For these reasons, we have become activists — not to defend poor quality, but to make sure there are watchdogs in a system that has been so thoroughly contaminated.

Sincerely,

The NY Teacher and agita

2009-06-07T22:08:00.035-04:00

What a self-congratulatory, biased, obsfuscatory, and exclusionary rag the NY Teacher is.

In a post I wrote last September, I said I thought it had morphed into some kind of arm of the DoE, with all its Tweed friendly, Tweed collaborative, Tweed duped, and Much Ado About Nothing articles.

I don’t know whether to laugh at some of the things in there or cry.

For example, it’s really funny where Weingarten is talking about getting the cuts reduced and she says “Let’s take a moment to appreciate what we've accomplished so far.” In the very next sentence she says what really “saved the day” was the federal stimulus package. By her own admission, she accomplished little or nothing. It was Washington that came through with some cash.

I love it when she suggests that if adding some non-mayoral appointees to the central board “fails to make it into law” — as surely it will — there would be other ways to curtail Bloomberg’s "dominance." I’m taking this as a joke, and I’m pretty sure she is, too. I mean, she has to say something if she’s going to defend her indefensible position on continuing mayoral control.

What does Weingarten suggest to rein in this mayor? Three things. Give the board members fixed terms — that’s so they can say “Yes, sir! Of course, sir!” for a finite number of months before a new group of flunkies is rotated in. Increase the number of DoE actions that require board approval — as if Joel Klein ever wanted, thought he needed, or asked for approval for the nefarious, sometimes illegal schemes he’s gotten away with. And end “the chancellor’s voting status and automatic chairmanship of the board” — like fish Klein would give that one up. Isn’t she a card?

I also love it when she crows over the test scores:

Almost any way you look at the data, there was good news in the June 1 release of the 2009 statewide math test scores.

Puh-lease. Don’t tell us about test scores being better this year without getting an impartial evaluator to determine whether the newer tests were dumbed down last time round. Absent that teeny-weeny bit of information, what does anyone gain by calling the higher scores “good news” except to score a political point dealing with BloomKlein or give a very transparent tap on the back to math teachers, who might really have had nothing to do with this year’s “improvement” at all.

By the way, you have to wade through to the last paragraph to see the demurral: “Overall, gains in scale scores were much more modest than gains in proficiency.” I guess that’s why Regents Chancellor Merryl Tisch and State Ed Commissioner Richard Mills “recommended looking at the finer detail of scale scores (students are graded on a scale of 400 to the upper 700s) rather than the simplified level scores (in which students are graded on Levels 1 to 4, and small gains can bump into the next level) for a truer picture.” Not to mention that there are times when Weingarten finds it convenient to downplay test scores, like when she's selling her new ACES network.

I’m not laughing anymore and start flicking through the thing a lot faster, until a “Schedule of Program and Operating Expenses” for the year ending last July 31 catches my eye on page 32.

Payroll last year (and probably every year) was the biggest expense. Between the Borough office and Central, the union spent a cool $29,971,086 on staff salaries, plus an additional $12,648,653 for additional benefits and taxes. Total: $42,619,739.

Way down the list, after the Conventions, Workshops & conferences, Meeting expenses, Travel, Lodging, Negotiations, Legal fees, Consulting fees, Elections & referenda, Chapter Leaders’ stipends, and DoE released time cost, there’s this:

ARBITRATION: $171, 078.

Is that the figure they're saying they spent for a whole year's worth of arbitrations? In this climate of administrator thuggery? The only redress a member has with Step Is and IIs being so reliably unsuccessful is arbitration, and the union paid so little for it? That's weird. If that number included AAA fees for surveys and elections, it would make what they spent on our Step IIIs even less.

With so much union-bashing these days, it’s definitely not funny that Arbitration came to only 0.4% of the UFT staff payroll. That's just not enough money spent on defending members. What’s also not funny is that the amount laid out for Gifts and condolences — $47,396 — is a quarter (27.7%) of the Arbitration amount. What are they buying everyone, mink coats?

There's no clarification of these terms and categories in the chart, so it's obvious no one's really interested in helping us understand what their expenditures really are. For all I know, the amounts listed in Legal fees ($2,712,223) and Consulting fees ($1,131,153) could actually include the costs of defending members. I doubt it, though. I'm told it's the DoE that pays the arbitration costs for 3020-a cases, not the union, and I’ve asked a couple of people what the difference between “Total Expenses” and “Non-Chargeable Expenses” might be, but they don’t know either.

As I said, I'm not sure whether to laugh or cry when I read this stuff.

All I can hear in the background is the kerching!, kerching! of our dues money dropping into murky union coffers, and as the Queen of England says: We are not amused.

ACES sounds like ICE

2009-05-30T02:17:00.052-04:00

If you had a chance to read Randi Weingarten’s speech at the May 9th UFT Spring Education Conference, you might have thought the union president was preparing to run on the ICE ticket in the next election.

Because it's bits like these that have been central to ICE discussions for years, that problems in the schools have to be addressed within the context of larger social communities and that teachers should never be scapegoats for problems over which they have very little control:

It’s time for a new strategy — one that of course focuses on instruction, but also aims at the root causes of chronic school failure, one that addresses the needs of the community and its families. . . .

What would happen if we not only acknowledged that there are conditions in children’s lives that make it harder for them to learn, but actually did something about it?

And:

The learning process itself depends first and foremost on the smarts and sensitivity of the teacher – the teacher who must discern how each child learns and have at her fingertips a panoply of strategies, materials and resources to provide just the right combination that will get through to each child. . . .

And that’s why, for reforms to be successful, they must be developed with teachers, not imposed on them.

But many influences merge in that moment the teacher reaches into her bag of tricks (actually, her reservoir of accumulated skills and knowledge) and comes up with just the right instructional solution.

Some of these influences are out of the teacher’s control. . . .

Teachers alone cannot cure a child’s asthma or repair a stormy family situation.

In fact, Weingarten's new “comprehensive school turnaround model to serve our neediest children in our most challenging educational settings” — she’s calling it ACES, Active Communities Enabling Success — smacks of the election platform ICE wrote back in 2004.

That document was put together by more than twenty dedicated, politically savvy educators with enormous classroom experience in New York public schools. I’m not going to post the whole thing here because there's a link to it on the ICE website in the left side column.

I don't want this union leader to go one step further casting herself as a visionary of ed reform without making it clear that the essential points of the program she’s introducing originated not in her own Unity caucus, but in the opposition — the same opposition she's taken great pains to marginalize and deride in the past few years. For proof, just look at the way she wrested the HS seats from ICE/TJC in the last election and the way she manipulates procedures at the delegate assemblies to get the votes to go her way.

So when Weingarten says that smaller class size is one of the things “we are still fighting for today," let’s remember it took her many years to make class size a real priority. In 2004, ICE not only pushed smaller classes in its platform, but criticized the Unity strategies that undermined them:

Small classes are the underpinning of an effective classroom, and are especially crucial where children have low performance levels and special needs. . . .

Our union leaders continue to undermine the fight for lower class sizes by:
— Not successfully tying class size to learning conditions.
— Adopting the strategy that a referendum was the only way of lowering class size. . .
— Continuing to support out-of-classroom positions which in fact contribute to large class size because it diverts money for pedagogical personnel away from the classroom. Included in this are the thousands of facilitators, mentors, staff developers, coaches, and teacher center personnel.
— Supporting currently mandated programs and strategies from the DOE, multiple grouping, balanced literacy, and the new math program, which are impossible to implement with class sizes over 18 to 20.

Our union’s position on class size should be:
— Class size limits comparable with other districts in the state and capped by contract
— No half-class size loopholes, and no excuses in overcrowded buildings where classroom teacher-student ratio can still be lowered.

And when Weingarten trumpets the importance of teacher input and skill in statements like these:

The learning process itself depends first and foremost on the smarts and sensitivity of the teacher — the teacher who must discern how each child learns and have at her fingertips a panoply of strategies, materials and resources to provide just the right combination that will get through to each child. . . . And that’s why, for reforms to be successful, they must be developed with teachers, not imposed on them. . . .

Teachers would be allowed to unleash their amazing creativity.

she not only hasn't protected us from the micro-management of our classrooms, but has for the most part condoned it. (Has anyone ever won a grievance under Article 24 for interference in the way we want to teach? That thing has absolutely no teeth in it, and she knows it.) ICE had to remind Weingarten in 2004 that she could be doing a lot more to protect us from zealous administrators trying to make their bonuses:

Basic trust in the professionalism and knowledge of teachers. The current school “reform” is premised on a distrust of teachers (as well as any independent-minded local school leadership) with change to be commanded from the top supervisory levels. Our union leadership is allowing the DOE to violate Article 24 of our contract, which states, “The Board and the Union agree that professional involvement of teachers in educational issues should be encouraged”, and provides procedures to work out differences between teacher and administrative judgment. With the DOE model, decisions about instruction are made prescriptively and through packaged programs, and place enormous restrictions on a teacher’s ability to service the needs of individual students.

— Teachers must have a say in what goes on in the classroom, a contractual right that is presently violated by the DOE.

— Teachers’ own practical knowledge should be the basis for change, rather than one-size-fits-all program.

— Planning for instruction and curriculum reform should be arrived at through respectful relationships among all staff.

On testing, Weingarten says that the ACES network she's proposing

would not shy away from accountability. But it would seek broader metrics than just test scores and graduation rates to measure its success. It would ask such questions as: Is the school safe? Do children come to school every day? Are they healthier, more engaged? Are they critical thinkers and problem solvers? Are they involved in community service? Are their parents active in the school?

Come on. ICE and many others have made this point all along — not to mention the fact that whenever she's given credence to test scores and school grades, she’s buying into the DoE’s corpothink. And she gives credence to these all the time (see here, for example). Here’s ICE in 2004 on testing and long-term education goals:

Ending the misuse of city- and statewide tests, which increasingly distort the curricula and misrepresent true academic performance. Standardized test results can be a tool for evaluating instruction and pointing out where extra resources should be focused. But the current accountability model with its simplified goals and objectives results in students and teachers alike becoming prisoners of the achievement numbers game. This model also ignores any accountability for long-term learning goals or the kinds of learning that might give educators and students cause for satisfaction.

Good teachers develop an awareness of how children actually learn. The premise that children will learn more when they are subjected to weeks of teaching-to-the-test methodologies, that they become more successful students when strict standardized levels are set for them, or that they respond positively to threats and punishment are ideologically driven beliefs, contrary to what we know as experienced educators. An additional consequence of high stakes testing is that those children most in need become a liability to a school which then leads to an attempt to pass them off to another school instead of addressing their needs. . . .

— Teachers must play a primary role in judging student levels and progress from elementary school through high school.

— Students should have the opportunity to demonstrate their learning in a variety of ways.

Weingarten is now envisioning schools as hubs of community involvement. I guess she was unaware how much ICE has been advocating broader services for kids and fostering strong relationships between schools and the communities they serve:

Our long-term teachers could be a valuable resource in reaching out to the community and together formulating models for success.

And:

Using teachers’ knowledge of their students’ communities as a basis for building successful schools. This includes the culture, history, experience and knowledge which the families and communities bring to this process. Neither the DOE nor our union leadership has an appreciation for how spending years, or even decades, working in the same neighborhood might yield valuable knowledge. Union leaders support the assumption of the school system managers that teachers are replaceable parts and will be fine with that as long as they have transfer rights and the guarantee of a job . . . somewhere.

Remember this was written way before Weingarten negotiated a contract that allowed for the ATR debacle.

Weingarten has always pushed PD, oblivious to how inappropriate so much of it is. In this speech she says teachers “would help shape the professional development they need" and help deliver it.

Sorry, but ICE already called for that years ago:

Meaningful professional development. Presently new and less experienced teachers are not allowed to grow into good teachers. They are not given the opportunity to try strategies and take risks. Ill-prepared and poorly trained administrators, coaches, regional personnel (some still politically appointed), have reduced professional support to a checklist with the intention of instilling fear and intimidation. The UFT has allowed these methods to distort teacher training and leave teachers open to attack.

— The UFT should be demanding school-based professional development determined by teacher need.

Lastly, does Weingarten think she’s saying something new when she concludes that:

As a community, we can let teachers teach and managers manage, but we can also help one another. We can make all our schools work for all our kids by pitching in together, not walking away and leaving the hard work to others.

I hope not. Because ICE laid it all out quite clearly five years ago.

Our union must stand up to the scapegoating of teachers for the problems of our school system. It must work to build coalitions of teachers, parents, active community members at the school and citywide level, and employees of other city agencies so that we can’t be played off against one another by the mayor and Department of Education.

We need a union that will lead and fight for an education system that meets the needs of all the students in our city, an overwhelming number of whom are poor and of diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds. It would take enormous changes and massive resources to correct the inequities in our society, but well-run schools with well-trained staffs, good programs, supportive services and small classes can bring about improvements for all children. To think that communities with vast economic and social differences can succeed with identical monetary resources is a mistaken notion and a popular political ploy.

The union leadership must be ready to expose such lies and not allow failures in our society to fall squarely on the backs of teachers and our union. Our union must also challenge all the various schemes to destroy public education by diverting money to private schools through vouchers, to DOE-funded charter schools or by hiring private companies to run public schools, which can only further polarize both our educational system and our society.

I challenge anyone to claim that Weingarten is forging new paths with her ACES proposal.

There only two innovative thoughts in this whole speech: that Bloomberg has ever been willing to take responsibility for the troubles in the schools ("In fact, even the UFT admired Mayor Bloomberg’s willingness to take responsibility, and many of us still do") and that this mayor and this chancellor are ever going to enter into any "collaborative, coordinated, comprehensive school turnaround model" with the union, educators and school communities any time soon.

Under Assault: Teaching in NYC

What passes as the "least restrictive environment" these days

Reaching for the whistle

The union talks a good game about special ed violations

This just in !

Raw experience into words

NO BLOOMBERG !

Faulty technology at the DoE:Incompetence, or hiding the facts

BLOOMBERG MUST GO — far from New York City

On hold for good reasons

Greg Palast's new war

Electoral hardware: another arm of the privatization monster

Neoliberalconservatism

Neoliberalism, Charter Schools and the Chicago ModelObama and Duncan's Education Policy:Like Bush's, Only Worse

Wearing the right shoes

Looking for Michael B.

Now for some levity . . .

Obama's double-take

Welcome to Lilliput

Barron and the art of protest

Scott the pol

The Age of Enlightenment on its way out

The inimitable

Crime down, PR up

Woof, woof!

The NY Teacher and agita

ACES sounds like ICE

Neoliberalism, Charter Schools and the Chicago Model
Obama and Duncan's Education Policy:
Like Bush's, Only Worse